The design, development and verification of new aircraft electrical power systems require increasing costs and lead times because of the higher complexity and demand for aircraft electrical loads, associated controls and the protection these systems require. Higher costs and lead times make new aircraft and upgrades to the legacy aircraft less affordable. As a result, the conventional approach to the design, development and verification of aircraft is becoming a less viable solution.
The current conventional approach of power system development requires multiple iterations of design, modeling, build, test, and modification. Iterations extend the cost and time of development, causing budget overruns and schedule delays. Often times, multiple iterations are needed because the design models lack sufficient fidelity to predict the outputs of the design accurately.
The Hardware-in-the-Loop (HWIL) method is increasingly used in design and development of aircraft systems, subsystems, and components because the method can be used to predict the performance of the subsystems and components in a system without having to build them. However, in order to make the method effective, two things are necessary. One is that the models in the HWIL method must be real-time; the other is that the models must have sufficient fidelity. With approaches in use today, these two requirements are not simultaneously attainable. In order to be real-time, model fidelity and accuracy are often sacrificed, or, conversely, greater model fidelity and accuracy are achieved at the expense of computation time. These trade-offs considerably limit the effectiveness of the HWIL method.